I am speechless. We have a current sitting Senator that embellished his military service and was given a pass by the media.
Maryland Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Douglas Gansler committed a campaign faux pas this week when he intoned that his opponent, Lt. Governor and Iraq war veteran Anthony Brown, was not as prepared to do a “real job.” The situation is full of peculiarities. Fox News jumped all over the opportunity to support the military, and slam a Democrat at the same time, but they misconstrued Gansler’s “real job” remark to mean the job of governor when he was really talking about healthcare reform. Fox completely glossed over that aspect, because Gansler is a Democrat criticizing a Democrat for mismanagement of a healthcare rollout. Gansler also blew the matter of Brown’s military service as a campaign issue out of proportion more than Fox. So it goes with curious cases of veterans in American political campaigns.
The issue is similar to the rancor that occurred during the Arkansas senatorial campaign when Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor said that his challenger, Iraq vet and first-term congressman Tom Cotton, felt “entitled” to office because of his military record. Cotton fired back by calling Pryor a liar and saying that the federal government needs the sort of values he learned in the army. Both cases are reminiscent of John Glenn’s famous “I have held a job” retort to Howard Metzenbaum in 1974.
So long as veterans running for office promote their military service as a job qualification, the relative value of their service should be on the debate table. But American veterans are taking unfair advantage of the population’s newfound reverence for “our heroes.” No civilian politician can debate the merits of military service in government without becoming a pariah, and no veteran candidate will undermine their ace in the hole. So it falls to a veteran with Shermanesque interest in political office to submit, for the benefit of public discourse, the 10 most inconvenient reasons why you shouldn’t vote for a veteran.